On My Sister’s Birthday

Today is Charity’s birthday. Jay-Z’s song Young Forever is playing on loop in my mind. I have not listened to the song in years, but it has become the soundtrack of my reflective state of mind this morning.

My sister would be 48 years old now. She died just shy of her 44th birthday. It is not lost on me that I am now older than she ever got to be.

Some of the funniest stories I remember about my sister involve her constantly lying about her age. She was desperate to stay young forever, or at least to be seen as forever young. Her stories were unbelievable, but still, somehow, some people believed her and were shocked when they found out how old she actually was after she passed.

One time, she asked me to lie about her age to someone by saying that I was her older brother. “The best I can do is not say your actual age,” I responded. “But I’m not telling anyone I’m your older brother.”

I went to tell her she should be proud of her age; it meant that we survived.

“Ummm, that’s good for you. I’m okay with looking young.”

We throw out sayings like “Black don’t crack.” But we do tend to die young, at least here in North America. While the studies are still ongoing, researchers and medical practitioners, like Gabor Maté, have suggested that trauma causes epigenetic changes that increase the probability of disease over time.

I may never know what caused Charity’s cancer with certainty. Still, I am convinced that the trauma she endured at different points in her life created the conditions mentally and somatically where disease and illness thrived instead of her whole self being allowed to flourish.

My sister was intelligent, creative, funny, and able to work hard when she put her mind to something. She had dreams of becoming a lawyer. Even when pursuing the dream was hard, she never let go of it. She remained committed to the possibility. She could see the reality of that dream in her mind, and that vision was what she held onto.

The shadow of this is that trauma caused a disintegration and dysregulation of the self that employed her brilliance in ways that caused harm to her sense of identity. That trauma attacked parts of who she was, like carcinogenic factors. In this way, there was cancer in her self before there was ever cancer in her body.

This may seem like an odd way to memorialize my sister on her birthday. I do not know why this is where my mind went as I sat down to write about her. I feel like a commitment to honesty—no matter how difficult—is the way that allows all of her to continue now, when in life she felt her self bifurcated, as a necessity of survival. I know that even in her own suffering, she wanted to atone for the harm she caused. Maybe these words are a continuation of her desire.

Unprocessed trauma fractures the self and shows up in the body, rupturing the whole, often in deadly ways. The life expectancy of black people in North America is lower than other ethnic groups. As a result, we die younger and experience higher rates of disease. This is not inherent to who we are, but shaped by the environments in which we live. In my opinion, asking how we reconcile these realities with wholeness and healing is a distinctly Charity kind of proposition. It is the kind of work she would absolutely want her memory to make possible in this world. It is a continuation of her own processing, and of her desire for healing.

I am not a doctor or a medical researcher, but my brother is. I am a theologian and wordsmith. And maybe, somewhere between words and research, both of us are memorializing her by continuing her desire for healing through the mediums we have at hand. In this way, I think the song Young Forever is a fitting soundtrack for the questions and possibilities my sister’s memory still raises.